Without a label for the first time in nearly a decade, Cincinnati’s Foxy Shazam drops its most ambitious album

Last fall, a Foxy Shazam interview was
convened at bassist Daisy Caplan’s Northside home for the purpose of
discussing the band’s tour-ending, two-show extravaganza in Cincinnati —
a full production at Bogart’s in Corryville, and an intimate club date
at Northside’s Mayday.

One topic that was very much on
everyone’s mind that evening (and yet relatively off-limits for
discussion) was the band’s nearly completed fifth album. The band
members — Caplan, vocalist Eric Nally, guitarist Loren Turner,
keyboardist Sky White and trumpeter/back-up vocalist Alex Nauth, sans
unavoidably detained drummer Aaron McVeigh — all danced around the
subject, scattering the sparest bits of information about the
titled-but-not-for-public-dissemination album. It was written after the
tour for The Church of Rock and Roll, over the course of a year
in a rented rehearsal space; it had been produced by renowned boardsman
Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago; and it was
different, perhaps a defining moment in Foxy Shazam’s 10-year history.

Fast forward to the here and now. Foxy has just returned home after a month-long circuit to promote the aforementioned Gonzo, the third album with the current lineup and the band’s first self-released album since its debut, 2005’s The Flamingo Trigger.
The nine-track conceptual song cycle was released on April 2 as a free
download (at fs-gonzo.bandcamp.com), and trumpeter/backing vocalist Alex
Nauth couldn’t be happier talking about Foxy’s latest tour and, at long
last, the details surrounding Gonzo.

“We really wanted to tell you about it,” Nauth says. “Between CityBeat
and (playing at) home, it was the perfect combination, but I think you
can see the plan of how we wanted to do this and the surprise element —
it was important and it definitely worked in its own way. The small
shock factor — how we released it and being free, and even the
production quality of the record itself. It was hard keeping it under
wraps, and it was hard being off the road for that long. This tour was
like a massive release for us.”

The Gonzo tour is another example
of Foxy’s new mindset. Rather than going out for huge blocks of time
punctuated by short week-long breaks, the circuits will be of a shorter
duration with more time at home to accommodate families and allow for a
more quality recharge.

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“We’re on our own right now, and we wanted to make sure everything
went without a hiccup, going from label support financially to
something of our own. Almost every night was pretty sold out, and we’re
putting on more of a production now, and we’re really proud of it. In
some respects, I think Gonzo was made to be heard live.”

As the band hinted at last year, Gonzo
is a very different animal for Foxy Shazam, not in a departure-of-style
sense, but in the way the band wrote, recorded and considered their
individual places within the band. On the writing/recording front, the
big shift was that Foxy wrote as a unit and recorded live in the same
room, lending Gonzo an air of immediacy and energy. It also represents, in more ways than one, a return to Foxy’s earliest musical explorations.

“As a band, we’re going to explore every
genre of music and sound, and it will be different combinations each
time,” Nauth says. “Especially with my instrument, I feel like I got to
delve a little more into those aspects. The songs we were coming up with
together were allowing those avenues of creativity, like these jazzier
elements and, in my particular realm, the horn working with the guitar
and bass in a way that, in my opinion, a Jazz musician might do, not a
Rock musician.”

Another big shift on Gonzo took
place between Caplan and Turner. At one point, to shake things up, the
bassist and guitarist swapped instruments as well roles within the band.
It proved to be the tonic necessary to move the album forward.

“I hugely attest that to Loren and Daisy
making that switch,” Nauth says. “Loren wrote these funky bass lines
that Daisy might not have done before, and it just brought the whole
thing together. We kept hitting a wall, and with Daisy and Loren
switching respective instruments, it opened up immediately and that wall
disappeared and opened up a whole new world for us. It was a huge
blessing and I think what makes Gonzo sound the way it does.”

The switch was so successful that it’s
been implemented during the tour as well; because of the conceptual
nature of the album, Foxy plays the album from beginning to end, with
Caplan on guitar and Turner on bass, and then after a short
intermission, the band returns to play from its back catalog.

“We play Gonzo from top to bottom,
then we take a break and change clothes — or take some off, I suppose —
then we come back on and play our older material,” Nauth says.

As stated, Gonzo is also a
conceptual piece, a fact that, for this tour at least, makes it
necessary from Foxy’s perspective to present the album in its entirety
and its established running order. Nauth is quick to credit Nally with
an even greater degree of openness and vulnerability on Gonzo.

“Eric really opened up lyrically on this
record, not that he wasn’t before, but almost in a more personal way
that neither him or I had ever written before,” he says. “We used to
share some of those duties and work together on lyrics and melodies.
This time around, he really had something to say; it has to do with his
relationship with his father, growing older and even dementia, and
finding out who you really are. We were all exploring ourselves equally
on our respective instruments and I think it was the exact story that
all of us were going through at that exact time. Eric has the unique
ability to write it out perfectly.”

So as Foxy Shazam’s first large-scale,
self-financed tour wraps up its first leg, home is clearly on the
members’ minds. At least, home from a work perspective.

“We’re really excited to play Bunbury,”
Nauth says of this weekend’s homecoming show. “We’ve been talking about
it for the entire tour. I think it will be the final cap on this side of
the country. It’s home.”

FOXY SHAZAM plays the Bunbury Music Festival on Saturday at 9 p.m. on the River Stage.